Alonso at Wroom: Strongest opponent for 2013 = Lewis Hamilton Alonso recent Q&A on twitter: Best driver he's ever faced = Robert Kubica
Depends..... There are those who claim Hamilton had the fastest car in 2009 for example. I would like to know how Autosport worked out who had the fastest car, as if its going by lap time alone that assumes the driver has no bearing in F1 at all
Well they go by single lap time with qualifying against the fastest set (Lewis was fastest over the season, followed by Seb, then Webber, then Button and then Alonso), race pace is less accurate since there are different strategies being used and when you look at McLaren being 4th you can only but laugh since everybody and even RBR were copying McLaren's designs, that and they had those rotary wings for however long in the season until RBR were able to replicate it. Single lap is more accurate since there are less variables to contend with.
An interesting response, Silver! Please see my highlight and ask yourself if this "problem" you've sighted (apparently as an argument to offset Red Bull as having the fastest car in 2012), is driver induced? And if it is, would you not agree this might be regarded as a driver weakness? P.S. I hope you are not attempting to label me as a "Vettel hater"; I like him a lot and am a huge admirer of his skills!
It does miss one big variable which is the driver though. It makes the assumption that if you put me in the Red Bull its suddenly means the cars outright pace is slower than the HRTs, I mean 10 secs faster than everyone. Vettel and Hamilton are two of the stand out qualifiers of the grid, they would boost any cars apparent speed.
Nope not my intention. Seb hate has gotten pretty big in F1 that F1 drivers are doing it now Very true cosicave I agree with what you say, Sebs weakness is his immense desire to be faster than anything on 4 wheels and Lewis and Alonso know this, he is Well, unable to take the safe route where Lewis and Alonso might cave into it if the team pressed them. Seb though wont listen, he doesn't want to win, he wants to destroy all of them and it can easily backfire on him someday. But you could say the reason why McLaren looked so slow (4th) on race pace was because of the pitstops causing problems and higher lap times. That and as we know FOM would not like seeing 2 cars of the same team being 20-30 seconds ahead of 3rd place and might "wink" "wink" ask the FIA to "stop it" and then by *surprise* the advantage becomes illegal unless they of course try to pretend to be at maximum by making the gap look smaller. Of course this can be applied to 2011 as well when Seb could "conveniently" set any time in qualifying, or hold off any rival that got close within 4-5 seconds to make it look close, but not too close. So they had a rocket ship but wanted to hide it's true pace so they could win the WDC and control it. RBR's problem is that Seb refuses to hide that pace, where other drivers you could say are smarter than that.
I quite agree. Alonso is also a pretty good qualifier and both he, Button – and for that matter, Perez – are particularly good at playing the long game, with little regard for irrelevancies in the grand scheme of things (such as fastest laps, for instance). If and when points are awarded for the fastest lap during a race, that will be the time that they matter. In the mean time, they would appear to be a rather pointless goal, other than to achieve bragging rights perhaps more easily associated with children.
That's why you should really average it between the drivers and add the odd hundreth, tenth'(s) if the other driver was completely rubbish that year of course. You cant really find the maximum since both drivers cant really do it all the time, it's impossible unless done by computer could you get close enough. For all we know Pedro got more out of his car than either of the top 4 ever did which isn't impossible to think of since it is possible. So I think it's better to look for the "average maximum" rather than the maximum....maximum, since they don't take into account of retirements, problems with the car KERS failure etc... Somebody could find the best way to calculate the best car, but the more numbers there are, the more accurate it should be, 10 set of numbers are not as good as 1,000 sets. You cant use the fastest lap in 1 race to declare total speed, it's highly flawed. If I could I would go into more detail, take into considertation of clean air, traffic, Safety cars almost everything! Seperate heat of track, rain or shine.
Ultimately, anyone's conclusion about 'the fastest driver' [edit: or 'fastest car'] is based on one of two things: gut feeling; or bias. Attempts to prove it statistically will always include exceptions and anomalies which might be important to some, yet dismissed by others. I happen to believe Alonso's quoted opinions are based on 'gut feeling'. If others find it irritating to be left out of such an evaluation, it is their helmut to wear…
I'd say for the majority of the year McLaren had the fastest overall car (minus Vettels winning streak and Silverstone) but Button was awful for that stretch of races and McLaren themselves kept throwing away big points pracically every race. of the teams that were't sabataging themselves the Red-Bull was the fastest
I think the true pace of out and out speed would be best measured over the 2 drivers as an average and not the 1 exceptionally quick driver on any given weekend.
Indeed that's what I'm thinking, but first you have to find the total average between 12 sets of drivers and how quick between them are they. Maybe group RBR are faster/slower than group McLaren/Ferrari/Lotus by 0.001 - 2.000 a lap in both qualifying and race. After that we should be able to find a relative gap from car performance, maybe McLaren was actually slower than RBR but they both out did them on merit, maybe the McLaren was 1.5 seconds a lap faster but they're unable to get it's full potential over the season, etc ... etc But I'm sure they're many ways to do it better than how Autosport went about doing it.
It's probably no exaggeration to say that reasonable arguments could be made for roughly half the grid as the fastest driver in F1! That said, there is little value in any publication focussing attention on those not popularly believed to be reasonable candidates. Thus, 12 is quickly whittled down to 4 (or fewer) who bathe in the spotlight . Personal opinion plays its part; even in an attempt to base one's conclusion on statistical analysis or 'evidence', since one necessarily selects one's method to argue one's case. This will be true of Autosport's journalists as much as it is any enthusiastic member of a forum (including myself). We should also consider that in order to sell their product, journalists need to be seen as credible. I mentioned 'gut feeling' and 'bias' earlier. Of course, neither are necessarily based on logic. The biased person is capable of making arguments which actually over-ride his/her gut feeling â almost as a defence mechanism, or form of denial. On the other hand, 'gut feeling' is a belief about the truth, arrived at through one's experience and one's interpretation of it. It is essentially an instinctive feel for something and might even be accurately described as 'faith'. Conclusion: There can be no absolute truth; only the belief that there might beâ¦
A car that is fast on low tanks is not necessarily the quickest on full tanks. I'd rather have a car that was 2nd quickest in quali but know that it was the fastest in the race. Look at Mercedes. What's the point in qualifying well, if your car shreds tyres when its got fuel in it during the race?
I would prefer a car that was "average" in qualifying, would race very well in all conditions on race day and overtake very well and that reliability was a certainty, bit like the Ferrari since I would consider qualifying the lesser of 2 evils and that I could make the ground up against a great qualifying car within 15 odd laps with 40 odd to go. It just depends how you go about seeing fast and everybody's view on it is different of course. So it's true what you say, a fast qualifying car doesn't mean it's the strongest, but why was it able to stick with RBR and Seb, but never McLaren or Ferrari?
I don't think so, although a helmet might. Then again, I also think it possible that someone else might think others think that what I think is wrong – and Helmut could be right!
